Dallas Artist Inspired By Serial Deaths in Ciudad Juarez
by Megan K. Stack
For Proust, it was madeleines.
For Newton, an apple yanked to the ground in gravity's grip.
But it was a mysterious string of killings that inspired Dallas artist Celia Munoz to spin her most recent creation.
The unusual source for the gaudy, troubling exhibit in the Irving Arts Center outside Dallas may be a mark of Ms. Munoz's innovation.
Or it may be unsettling proof that the murders of Ciudad Juarez have taken up permanent residence in the psychological landscape of the Texas-Mexico border.
Scores of women have been slain in Juarez since 1993. Their bodies were abandoned in desolate stretches of Chihuahua desert, a stone's throw from the United States.
More than 50 of the young women and teens were raped before being beaten or stabbed to death.
"I think there is a quiet, driving rage behind (Ms. Munoz's) pursuit," Irving curator Marcie Inman said.
Ms. Munoz points out that many of the slain women disappeared on their way to work in foreign-owned factories. Maquiladoras have spread quickly through the city since the North American Free Trade Agreetment was inked, fed by cheap and plentiful labor.
Mexican authorities believe four bus drivers for maquiladoras are responsible for at least nine of the murders, and that a former factory engineer is responsible for two. Dozens more of the slayings are unsolved.
Ms. Munoz has filled a room the size of a banquet hall with her commentary on the fashion industry, feminism and women in Juarez. Thirty-foot swaths of cloth curl down from the ceiling. Women's clothes hang suspended and ghostly.
There are empty plastic diapers frozen in midair. A wedding dress draped in dried grasses. A mesh fence collar wrapped around the throat of an evening gown.
"To tell you the truth, most people don't really understand it," gallery maintenance worker Marshall Atkinson said. "Not unless they read the sign. They say, 'Oh, look at the pretty cloth'."
The rash of murders first caught the artist's eye in 1997.
"I'd go home and Mom would say, 'You know, it's getting creepier across the border'," the El Paso native said. "They found another body in the dump."
In Ms. Munoz's work, acres of fabrics and fake furs, arching ostrich plumes and rows of hollow women's shoes flank a plaque listing the deaths south of the Rio Grande.
The piece is a stepchild of the quietly subversive works that sprang up under Latin-American dictators of the mid-20th century, said Cheryl Hartup, a curatorial assistant at the Dallas Museum of Art.
"That was when artists were in danger, so they would step around issues," Ms. Hartup explained. "You could read into the works, but there was no direct statement."
The arrangement is the latest brainchild of one of the country's foremost conceptual artist. Ms. Munoz's bold, perplexing designs have garnered praise from San Francisco to New York.
A 63-year-old Mexican-American woman who grew up just a few miles north of the border, Ms. Munoz knows plenty about factor labor, Ciudad Juarez, and women on the border.
When Ms. Munoz's father was shipped off to fight in World War II, she and her mother lived in government's housing. To keep the family afloat, her mother worked long hours stitching men's clothing in El Paso garment factories.
"I'm close to the plight and fight of the factory worker," Ms. Munoz said. "I remember the late shifts, the women walking home together. It was really very similar" to Juarez maquiladora culture.
And Ms. Munoz remembers Juarez, back before the sleepy border city exploded into frenzied growth in the NAFTA years.
"Back then, it was slick and seductive," Ms. Moniz said.
But now, Ms. Munoz said, Juarez stirs rage.
"Yes, yes, anger," she said. "Yes - and fear."